Why shouldn’t you eat horse?

From Tesco to Burger King to IKEA, the horse-meat saga has gripped the western world for the past month. Horse hasn’t even made it into stateside meaty meals, but you wouldn’t know it from our outsize horror at the idea of chowing down on lovable ponies.

As someone who hasn’t eaten animals in a really long time, I’ve been kind of confused about all this. Why the moral panic about this four-legged mammal and not all the other ones that end up in sandwiches? This isn’t a modest proposal — I’m genuinely trying to understand.

“The unfolding drama around Europe’s horse-meat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity,” Marion Nestle wrote at Food Politics. “They (other people) eat horse meat. We don’t. Most Americans say they won’t eat horse meat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.”

As Cord Jefferson points out at Gawker in a post entitled “You should eat horse,” horse meat is cheaper than beef, comparable in terms of calories and protein, and has way more omega-3 fatty acids. But he notes that there’s some legit cause for concern:

There are two very valid reasons to be upset at the thought of someone switching your beef with horse. The first is that consumers have a right to purchase food whose labels don’t lie to them. Secondly, not all horse meat is created equal. While some horses killed for food, particularly those in Europe, are safe for human consumption, many of the more than 100,000 American horses shipped outside our borders to be eaten annually are former racing animals whose flesh is laced with steroids and other chemicals as harmful as phenylbutazone. European food-safety officials started turning away American horse meat last year for fear it was too full of dangerous drugs, but this horse-as-beef scandal now calls into question how effective those officials actually are.

I think we can all agree that our food safety system sucks. But this horse-meat scandal also calls into question our deep cultural food biases.